Low Power High Frequency Surface Wave Radar Application for Ship Detection and Tracking

A. DZVONKOVSKAYA, K.-W. GURGEL, H. ROHLING, and T. SCHLICK
Radar 2008 Conference, Proceedings.
Abstract - -
High-Frequency (HF) radars are operated in the 3-30 MHz frequency band and are known to cover ranges up to some thousand
kilometers. Sky wave Over-the-Horizon Radars (OTHR) utilize reflection by the ionosphere, but they require a
transmit power up to 100 kilowatts. Especially for oceanographic applications, low power High Frequency Surface Wave Radar
(HFSWR) systems have been developed, which use ground wave propagation along the salty ocean surface. The WERA HF radar system
transmits a power as low as 30 watts, but achieves detection ranges up to 200 kilometers, which are far beyond
the conventional
microwave radar coverage. Due to external noise, radio frequency interference, and different kinds of clutter, special techniques
for target detection have to be applied. This paper describes a new signal processing approach based on a curvilinear regression
analysis for thresholding combined with a constant false-alarm-rate (CFAR) algorithm for detection. The target locations detected
by the HF radar are passed to a tracking filter utilizing range, azimuth, as well as radial and azimuthal velocities to track the
ship locations. For a 12-hour period real HF radar data from the WERA system were processed and secondary ship locations were
recorded from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). This data set is used to assess the performance of the HF radar
detections. Comparisons have been made for a maximum distance of 5 km between AIS and radar detected locations. The deviation
between AIS and radar detected locations was below 1 kilometer in 77% of these comparisons. A number of ships was detected and
tracked by the radar, but could not be used for comparisons due to the lack of AIS information.
klaus-werner.gurgel@uni-hamburg.de Last update: Wednesday, 25-Nov-2015 15:30:57 CET